Tag: API

In case you’ve missed it, there’s six minutes of your Friday that you should not miss. The idSoftware crew demonstrated their 2016 remake of legendary DOOM, a game that practically created the first person shooter (FPS) genre. The original daddy of FPS also came from the same team. Couple of months ago, we saw that DOOM Multiplayer achieves 60 fps with ease on anything faster than a three year old Radeon R9 290, I look forward to seeing a title that will bring me back to my childhood. 🙂 In meanwhile, enjoy in these five minutes and fifty-six seconds. The team demonstrated Full HD, 1920×1080 resolution in continuous 60 frames per second

Many Cloud providers claim their service is the best for your cloud computing needs. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a hotbed of computing for the better part of last decade, and we’re seeing the revenue and profit numbers delivered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others. The rise of IaaS is also one of key reasons why Dell went on a bend in order to acquire EMC, and many others. Measuring the performance of infrastructure is a critical task, and this is where SPEC, an industry consortium comes along. Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation i.e. SPEC creates benchmarks based on real-world workloads, from professional / commercial graphics in

According to multiple sources we managed to talk to during the last couple of industry conferences, and the story that just break today, Sony is rushing ahead towards introduction of “Playstation 4.5”, codenamed NEO. The company decided to update the console rather than performing a ‘simple’ die shrink, a tactic both Microsoft and Sony utilized over the lifetime of their Playstation 2 and 3, Xbox and 360 consoles. The original plan for NEO was to introduce a 14nm die-shrink of 8-core Jaguar processor and an update of a GCN-based graphics processor. However, a shift from 28nm to 14nm is significantly more complex due to the fact that 28nm process used

From its early days, the main focus for OTOY was disruption of the visual effects industry (FX). Split between quick-but-unreliable rasterizing and slow-but-correct ray-tracing, both computer games and movies suffer from the same fate when it comes to rendering physically and perspective-correct worlds. OTOY is working on changing that through their Octane Renderer and Brigade, mixed RT/ROP engine. However, OTOY did not want to stop at creating a physically correct graphics engine. During our visit at the company’s HQ in 2013, OTOY was working on initial deployment of Kepler-based graphics cards, with an initial target of deploying 3,000 GPUs for their cloud rendering business. Under the

VentureBeat reports that Los Angeles-based OTOY managed to reverse engineer Nvidia’s CUDA language to run on chips other than Nvidia’s own GPUs. That means programs written in the CUDA language can now run on GPUs provided by Intel, AMD, and ARM. Thus, software built for NVIDIA GPUs will work on a multitude of devices ranging from an AMD-based console (PlayStaton 4, Xbox One) to an Apple iPad or iPhone. The cloud rendering company launched in January 2009, and has developed a technology that uses “clusters of GPUs” in the cloud to render cinema-quality graphics that’s streamed to a client within a web browser. The company also provides

Recently, Nizar Romdan (Director, Developer Ecosystem ARM) made a somewhat spectacular, yet expected claim that graphics processor on mobile phones will overtake the current generation of consoles by 2017. He’s not the first – Jen-Hsun Huang often claims that NVIDIA Tegra processors rival desktop processors or graphics on gaming consoles. While theoretical statements based on numbers are all nice and dandy, realities are that we haven’t seen ‘console-level’ or ‘desktop-level’ performance on mobile parts. Coming to the fore is Tim Sweeney (CEO and Founder, Epic Games), whose code wizards created the ProtoStar demo for Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone. ProtoStar is a demo based on Unreal Engine 4.10, and

AMD is a company well-known for designing and adopting standards which soon become ‘open’ and ultimately become industry standards. What makes their approach unique is that quite often, AMD did not benefit from that strategy as the standards would explode in markets where the company is not present. Still, the list of open standards created by a tiny giant from Sunnyvale / Austin is remarkable. Khronos Group just released a ‘final initial’ (v1.0) specification of Vulkan low-level API (Application Program Interface). Launched as Mantle, AMD’s in-house, low-level API became two snowballs: Microsoft reacted to Mantle by developing the DirectX 12 in as little as 17 months. Only four months prior to Mantle’s announcement, Microsoft informed

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 is Nvidia’s latest and greatest graphics card featuring the company’s new Maxwell GPU architecture. Nvidia claims that Maxwell is able to maintain performance while delivering better power efficiency. Sure, the Kepler architecture brought some amazing improvements when compared to the infamous Fermi architecture, but it was less revolutionary than the Maxwell architecture which debuted last year in the GTX 750 Ti. Below, you can see a single SMM block diagram of the Maxwell architecture, followed by the full GM-204 architecture. Keep in mind that this is not the full-blown version of Maxwell. The GeForce GTX 980 is based upon Nvidia’s GM-204 GPU

AMD’s Mantle API, since its inception has been considered to be a fairly exclusive program with AMD getting hundreds of requests (if not thousands) from developers all around the world to test out Mantle. Obviously, a company of AMD’s size isn’t entirely capable of supporting thousands of developers, yet. AMD is still struggling to achieve profitability and cannot commit enough engineering resources to the Mantle team in order to really give Mantle the attention it needs. Yes, Mantle is a proprietary set of low-level APIs and does give game developers unparalleled flexibility and that is why so many developers are excited to take a crack

There’s a new Civilization game that was just announced with a new game trailer and some limited screen shots. This new game is called Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth and it is basically the Civilization game franchise going beyond this planet and becoming SciFi. This game will focus on other worlds and universes and alien planets and will likely put humans against their environment and each other. Firaxis hasn’t said much about the game itself, but they did provide a pretty interesting trailer as well as some somewhat boring looking screenshots. Hopefully the game will look more interesting than the screenshots they provided when this